Norman Foster's New Hearst Tower Rises From Its 1928 Base

NEW YORK architecture has suffered a lot in recent years. The brief optimism born of a public rebellion against early proposals for ground zero has long since given in to cynicism. Since then it has often seemed that fear and melancholy have swamped our creative confidence.

Norman Foster's new Hearst Tower arrives just in time, slamming through the malaise like a hammer. Crisscrossed by a grid of bold steel cross-braces, its chiseled glass form rises with blunt force from the core of the old 1928 Hearst Building on Eighth Avenue, at 57th Street. Past and present don't fit seamlessly together here; they collide with ferocious energy.

This 46-story tower may be the most muscular symbol of corporate self-confidence to rise in New York since the 1960's, when Modernism was in full bloom, and most Americans embraced technological daring as a sure route to social progress.

While fires raged downtown on the afternoon of 9/11, Lord Foster was presenting his tower to the Hearst Corporation's design committee. Four and a half years later its opening dovetails with another major success, Renzo Piano's expansion of the Morgan Library, another sign that the city's energy is reviving.

In some ways the building fulfills a fantasy born in the late 1920's, when William Randolph Hearst hired Joseph Urban to design a new headquarters building for his newspaper empire. Although Urban would go on to design the New School (1930), one of the city's earliest examples of the International style, his beige cast-concrete Hearst Building is an eclectic fantasy rooted in his early sensibility as a set designer, mixing fin de siècle Vienna with dashes of Art Deco. (Hearst had envisioned a soaring tower atop the six-story base, but the Depression intervened, and the extra floors were never built.)

Part of what makes Lord Foster's building so mesmerizing is a constant shift in its visual relationship to the skyline. Seen from the south against the backdrop of the taller and blander glass- and brick-clad towers lining Eighth Avenue, its stubby crystalline form seems to have been arbitrarily sliced off at the top, so that it meets the sky abruptly. As you draw nearer, the facade's oversize triangular windows become disorienting, making the building's scale harder to grasp.

Once you step into the lobby, the aggressive exterior gives way to a vision that would fit comfortably in postwar corporate America. Water cascades down an enormous sloping fountain by the artist Jamie Carpenter at the back of the lobby. A pair of escalators shoot up from the fountain's edge to a second-floor cafeteria and exhibition space where a big, dark painting by Richard Long hangs on the polished black stone wall of the elevator core. The luxurious atmosphere seems more I.B.M. about 1955 than global media corporation of 2006.

The lobby is a reminder of how far the British architect Lord Foster has traveled in his long career. In the 1970's he was one of the most visible practitioners of a high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris. Since then his architecture practice has swollen to more than 700 employees from 65.

Although his work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic. And they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness. While the exterior of the original building is intact, for example, all six floors inside have been gutted. What was once raw concrete is now finished in smooth beige, a stripped stage set for what Lord Foster calls his "urban plaza."

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Norman Foster's Hearst Tower on Eighth Avenue.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The project is slightly reminiscent of his 2001 renovation of the British Museum, in which he enclosed the main courtyard under a glass canopy, treating what were once exterior facades as interior décor. The results, which blurred the distinction between new and old, had all the charm of a high-end mall.

Here Lord Foster's approach to history is frank and direct. It's as if the facades of the original building are really just there to keep out the rain.

A series of enormous steel columns shoots up through the space to support the tower above. The entire lobby is enclosed under a glass roof, so that as you look up, you can feel the full sweep of the tower rising above you.

The upper levels are designed with the same clarity. By pushing the elevator core to the back of the tower, Lord Foster was able to open up the floor plan so that most offices have sweeping views to the north and south. The building's exterior diamond-shaped pattern results in lovely canted glass walls in the corners of each floor that serve as communal areas for office employees. On the top level a corporate dining room offers a view to the east framed by two-story-tall triangular braces.

That skyline view made me reflect on the creative arc of so many of New York's big architectural offices. Fifty years ago, firms like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill translated the language of European Modernism into a style that became the progressive face of corporate America. Led by architects like Gordon Bunshaft, they made some magnificent contributions to the city's skyline, from the interlocking glass forms of Lever House (1951) to the gently cantilevered concrete slabs of the 1959 Pepsi-Cola building.

Yet by the late 1970's many of those firms were slumping toward mediocrity, compromised by an effort to be all things to all people as well as to incorporate a postmodern pastiche of period styles into their work.

The results are disconcertingly visible from the corporate dining room of the Hearst Tower. To the north, at Columbus Circle, are the lifeless jagged towers of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's recent Time Warner building; a few blocks south is the firm's hulking beige brick Worldwide Plaza, capped by a dainty copper pyramid, completed in 1989.

Superficially, the two towers have little in common. Yet both rely on style — one postmodern, the other contemporary — as a way of cloaking mundane boxes that add little magic to the skyline and, worse, have a strained relationship to the streets below. (The curving internal street of the Time Warner tower, a timid attempt to engage the street life around Columbus Circle, echoes the pointless circular arcade that surrounds the lobbies at the base of Worldwide Plaza.)

Despite its lingering status, Skidmore lost its way long ago.

Like Skidmore, Lord Foster's firm is a corporate enterprise, boasting branches in 18 cities. The majority of his clients are commercial. Yet even as his office grew, Lord Foster consistently managed to stamp all his work with a strong architectural identity while maintaining a high design standard.

And this is no small feat. In an uncertain age the Hearst Tower is deeply comforting: a building with confidence in its own values.